why adhere to web standards?

First posted in Tuesday, August 4th, 2009- and still just as relevant!!

Ten reasons to learn and use web standards

If you’re a web developer or designer new to the concept of web standards and are undecided on whether you should spend the time to learn all about them or not, here are some of the most important reasons for doing so.

This is also a useful list reason for when you need to validate why you work to web standards even if other don’t.

1. You look more professional

Other web professionals, prospective employers and clients can look at your work and know that you are a person who likes to keep up with changes in technology and make sure that your knowledge and skills are always current. It will make you look like a real web professional.

2.You’ll make your clients look good

Use web standards combined with best practices for accessibility and give your clients a chance to talk about how they cater to all people, and how they find it important that everybody can use their services or find information about their products. You will also avoid the bad publicity that can be caused by shutting out visitors like disabled people, Mac users, and mobile phone users. Remember when a user has a good experience on your web site they tell one person if they have a bad experience they’ll tell 10!!!

3. your maximising the number of potential visitors

You don’t know which device visitors will use to access your site. You may think you know, but unless you’re building an Intranet for a company that controls what browsers are installed on all machines then you really have no idea what device or technologies your users are using so by adhering to standards you have more chance of ensuring that your web pages look as you expect.

By using web standards properly you make sure that you have done your part in making your site work with the largest possible number of browsing devices.

4. Faster loading and reduced bandwidth usage

Well-structured markup that separates structure and content from presentation is generally much more compact than table-and-spacer-image-based tag soup. Documents will be smaller and faster for visitors to download. Like it or not, there are still many, many people connecting to the Internet through dialup.

5. Provide the foundation for accessibility

Using web standards does not guarantee that all aspects of your site will be accessible to people with disabilities, but it is a very good start. Make sure your documents are valid, well-structured, and semantic, and you’re well on the way towards having an accessible site.

6. Improve search engine rankings

Well-written content delivered through clean, well-structured, and semantic markup is delicious food for search engine spiders and will help your rankings. This, of course, will lead to increased traffic, which is what most website owners want.

7. Make your markup easier to maintain

Would you rather wade through many kilobytes of multiply nested tables and spacer images or just browse through a clean and well-structured document when you need to update your site?

Removing, inserting or editing presentation-free content is much easier and more efficient than having to make sure you get all the presentational cruft right. Using CSS to control layout also makes it much easier to make site-wide design changes.

8. Future-proof content

There is no way anyone can guarantee with 100% certainty that the documents created and stored electronically today will be readable in a hundred years. Or even fifty years. But if you separate content from presentation and use current web standards, you have done the best you can to ensure that your content can still be read even after you’re gone.

9. Good business sense

Why would any business owner say no to more visitors? A faster site? Improved search engine rankings? Potential good publicity? It doesn’t make sense to do so.

10. It’s the right way to do things

The web standards way is the way we should have built the web from the beginning. And now that we can, why not do something the right way and have a really excellent reason to feel good about yourself.

Most websites highlight the navigation item of the user’s location in the website, to help users orientate themselves. This is a fundamental requirement for basic usability, but can be a pain as you’ll need to tweak the HTML code behind the navigation for each and every page. So is it possible to have the navigation highlighted on every page, without having to tweak the HTML code on each and every page? Of course it is but the answers below require a lot more tweaking than is below if you are using Dreamweaver templates- but that’s for a post next week

You’ll then need to insert an id into the <body> tag. The id should be representative of where users are in the site and should change when users move to a different site section. When in ‘Home’ it should read <body id=”home”>, in ‘About Us’ it should be <body id=”about”> and in ‘Contact Us’ <body id=”contact”> etc.

Next, you create a new CSS rule:

#home .home, #about .about, #contact .contact
{
css rules go here
}

This creates rules that only takes effect when class=”home” is contained within id=”home”, and when class=”about” is in id=”about” and class=”contact” is in id=”contact”. These situations will only occur when the user is on the appropriate page, seamlessly creating our highlighted navigation item. Pretty cool!